In treating a patient, physicians, nurses or clinical specialists (collectively “clinicians”) may order an intervention for the patient, including diagnostic tests, or treatment protocols for the patient or a combination of both, or to track the execution/performance of the delivery of such orders. In making such clinical orders for the encounter, the clinician will typically provide the order or set of orders through a Computerized Provider Order Entry (“CPOE”) system, or an Electronic Medical Records (“EMR”) system. The difficulty with such methods is that the inventory of these systems must contain all orders and sets of orders that may be possible to be ordered during the delivery of care, or alternatively allow for free-form entry. Practically speaking, this can represent an inventory of 10,000-100,000 possible individual orders. In constructing this inventory for predefined standardized inventories, or reconciling against a standard nomenclature with models using free-form orders, the clinical orders are usually defined by the physician using natural language and using terminology that, while being familiar to the physician, may not be in standardized form or vernacular. As such, the diagnostic and treatment orders may be described numerous different ways. If the protocol is being entered into a CPOE or EMR system, then there is the possibility that errors could be introduced into the CPOE or EMR inventory given that the natural language orders prepared by the clinicians may be incorrectly interpreted, duplicated, and/or incorrectly configured into the system.
It is, therefore, desirable to provide a system and method for developing, implementing and managing orders, such as clinician orders, for the purpose of developing a standardized order inventory.